I have worked in 60 countries, covered wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and spent much of 2014 living inside West Africa’s Ebola zone, a place gripped by fear and death. What I experienced in the Philippines felt like a new level of ruthlessness: police officers’ summarily shooting anyone suspected of dealing or even using drugs, vigilantes’ taking seriously Mr. Duterte’s call to “slaughter them all.”

Camilo José Vergara has spent more than forty years photographing and rephotographing the same forgotten corners of American cities. From crumbling housing blocks in the Bronx and an abandoned Detroit mansion, to dwindling row houses in Camden and the many lives of a Los Angeles baptist church. In all cases Vergara eschews the monumental to focus on a city’s discreet pockets. Returning year after year to the same positions, he regenerates images even as the structures in front of his lens decompose and are reborn in a cycle of photographic renewal. Architecture given shape by time and neglect takes on an organic quality—a reminder that edifices are as temporary as the lives they shelter. Vergara’s urban generation loss depicts fluid cities as a mirror of the present aging into obsolescence. Ultimately his images force a reckoning with death, confronting our inability to grasp the undercurrents relegating urban space and time.

In time I came to understand the nature of my job as the father of this sartorial wild child: I didn’t need to fathom Abe or his stylistic impulses; I needed only to let him go where they took him and, for as long as he needed me, to follow along behind.

One of my favourite websites on the internet redesigns. I think he’s done two major redesigns since I started reading his blog, but there may have been more. One day maybe he’ll return to that iconic weird green. The new site is nice clean and readable. I should really update the design of this site. It’s remained unchanged since I switched from the old not so immaculate conception layout.